Manufacturing systems comprise machines, transportation elements, computers, storage buffers, people and other resources that are used together for manufacturing. One characteristic of modern manufacturing systems is flexibility. Flexibility in manufacturing systems is necessary to meet, for example, variability in production volume and mix requirements and production changeovers as a result of new product introductions. With frequent new product introductions, product life cycles are shortened and so, too, are process lifetimes. This leads to frequent manufacturing system changes and the necessity for corresponding redesigning, rebuilding, retooling and reconfiguring of the manufacturing system transfer lines to accommodate such changes. Therefore, manufacturing enterprises are continually analyzing their manufacturing systems.
Manufacturing systems have progressed to a point where disciplined design and management tools are commonplace. Preferably, manufacturing systems are designed, configured and managed using tools that include input not only from product design engineering, but also of constraints and capabilities from diverse disciplines such as supply chain management, sales, marketing and forecasting, labor management, capital asset management and allocation, machine maintenance and manufacturing engineering, for example. All such disciplines can have pronounced effects upon the manufacturing system and are similarly significantly affected by the manufacturing system. All of these various disciplines benefit from manufacturing system analysis tools. However, the applications and uses tend to be specialized and diverse in accordance with the specific needs and requirements of the various interested disciplines. For example, a manufacturing engineer may require sophisticated “what-if” capabilities to design a new manufacturing system, while another user, responsible for day-to-day improvements of a particular transfer line operation, may need the ability to process performance data obtained through automatic data collection. Yet another user interested in enterprise-wide analysis may require web-based access to compare the performance of production lines at several different plants. Though the exemplary applications differ, the various disciplines may require common analysis capabilities.
Modern manufacturing system analysis tools manifest in the form of sophisticated computer-based modeling and analysis algorithms. The diverse application and use requirements from the various interested disciplines have influenced development and evolution of such tools into highly-integrated, end-user applications characterized by consolidated user interfaces and modeling and analysis capabilities. As such, these tools tend to be tied to specific computing platforms thus making widespread enterprise deployment both difficult and costly. Cross-application or inter-disciplinary utilization of modeling and analysis capabilities of such highly integrated tools is also inherently cumbersome, thus resulting in duplication of efforts and costs in the development of non-common tools and their underlying analysis capabilities.